TACFI Award / W50S82-22-R-0004 / CWS Inform: Personnel and Unit Readiness Automation and Forecasting

The 175th FSS has a national defense-related mission, which aligns with the 2019 AF S&T Strategic Capabilities of Resilient Information Sharing and Rapid, Effective Decision-Making, of ensuring that the human resource and readiness data related to Airmen and Air Force civilians is easily accessible, consolidated, and integrated across all critical Air Force systems.   Specifically, they have a need for a system that ingests, normalizes, and consolidates personnel data, and then presents a supervisor or Commander and their staff with the Airmen’s, civilian’s, or unit’s readiness status in an easy to use and intuitive interface. Unit readiness is critical for meeting the needs of the National Security Strategy CWS Inform has been built out to meet the following needs: Ingests, normalizes, and consolidates personnel data, and presents a Commander and their staff with the unit’s readiness status and actionable intelligence. The system will also allow for the automation of repeatable tasks, such as the creation of readiness reports.   Automate Pre-Defined Playbooks To mitigate the impacts of personnel PCS’ing with loss of continuity, the Automated Readiness and Forecasting tool has the ability to define playbooks and SOPs.  This allows users to create workflows that will persist after personnel have transitioned out. Adapts to the People, Process, and Tech Already in Place The core of the platform is the automation and orchestration engine. Rather than looking to replace tools it works to organize activities between existing tools, automated redundant tasks, and improve overall efficiency. Industry Standards CWS Inform is built on a framework that allows for easy data ingestion and manipulation, and uses industry standards (no custom vendor languages) such as Python, Powershell, and Javascript for easy customization and maintenance. Technical Details The operating system is CentOS or RHEL, and CWS has been deployed using the latest security STIG requirements We deploy using Docker and Kubernetes The backend database is MongoDB The automation engine is written in python, allowing the extension of all python functionality inside the system  Custom dashboarding and charting is available through the use of javascript widgets CWS Inform has a fully integrated REST API